Ask HN: What is the best podcast you listened to in 2021?
I’ve been listening to all of Darknet Diaries this year and it’s been amazing. Hoping 2022 will be filled with similar gripping brain food. Happy new year.
The hosts tell the stories of great businesses (for example: TSMC, Berkshire Hathaway, and Standard Oil). They dive into each company's history (which is always fascinating), analyze what made the business tick, and discuss the lessons that can be learned from it. It's a bit like How I Built This, but geared toward founders rather than the general public and also much more entertaining.
A close second is How to Save The World by Katie Patrick. It is primarily about how to find and utilize cross-functional skills to influence/persuade others into improving the world in lots of ways (sustainability, energy use, ethical eating, etc). She takes a really practical approach as opposed to heavy-handed and/or smug tactics frequently associated with these campaigns. A great resource for NGOs, software devs, academics, policy makers, and others.
Atlas Obscura have a podcast, too: https://www.atlasobscura.com/podcast If you like the website, you're probably going to like the podcast as well.
If you know German, I can recommend Sternengeschichten (about astronomy) and Einschlafen Mit Wikipedia (they read articles from the German Wikipedia in a very quiet voice, great for falling asleep, as the title suggests).
Of those already mentioned, Fall Of Civilizations deserves special praise.
Honourable mention to Mobile Suit Breakdown podcast. The episode-by-episode analysis of the Gundam series has greatly improved my literary appreciation for a show I was otherwise only barely interested in. The hosts dig into not just the show but also the world that would have inspired the creators. A lot of background research goes into each installment. https://gundampodcast.com/
I especially enjoyed https://youtu.be/d2lJUOv0hLA, as I had no idea the first cities were already so advanced and lasted for so many centuries.
I started contributing to a cuneiform Python repo. With Unicode, it’s incredible to see symbols from 5000+ years ago in your terminal!
𒉢𒁓𒆷 𒆠 𒆤!
Interviews with addicts, homeless, prostitutes, pimps, murderers, gang members and other interesting folk on Skid Row, LA.
I've heard some really mesmerizing, tragic and bizarre things on that channel.
I particularly like those ones.
Also, “In our time”, which is my go-to for standalone episodes.
* The British History Podcast
* The History of English Podcast
Both are very well-made and entertaining. The second might actually be the highest quality series of lectures I’ve ever heard (including sources in person like at university).
Granted you listen to TWiV exclusively for hits, not for misses, but since I’m not a doctor myself and I was listening to keep abreast of the pandemic, wildly out-of-date info and dismissive attitudes toward anything without an RCT weren’t doing it for me.
Lex Fridman's: https://lexfridman.com/podcast
Naval's: https://nav.al/podcast
Good production values, the hosts and guests are great, and I love that they’re long enough to really get in depth on whatever subject they’re covering. Big back catalog as well.
Particularly interesting was the recent episodes on edibles, lobster, and smoke, but I can’t think of one that I didn’t enjoy and listen all the way through.
The Shrink Next Door:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-shrink-next-door/i...
The Always Sunny Podcast:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-always-sunny-podca...
I studied engineering because I thought we made most of the advancements that change the world through the application of technique.
It didn’t take me long to realize the importance of economic constraints and the mysterious way in which the market acts as a complex, mediating system. I became fascinated with economics.
But then, reading Adam Smith, heck, even Hayek, it’s evident that these guys were also doing philosophy. Their philosophic substrate is what they built their economics on. And that is fascinating. The line separating positive and normative turned out to be blurrier than I thought.
I still have an engineering mindset, but I try to be more thoughtful about what can be solved by it, and how the scope in which I apply it matters for my happiness and the ones I love.
My objective function is no longer max U.
Some of my favorite episodes are, top of my head, Mary Hirschfel on Aquinas and the market; Agnes Callard, on aspiration; Michael Munger on Desires and Morality; the ones with Zena Hits and Jeniffer Fray, but there are so many more.
Thanks Russ!
> https://thediplomat.com/2014/10/north-korea-defectors-and-th...
The rebuttals come from a Swiss-born businessman, Felix Abt, who I would say is an "interesting" guy himself:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_Abt
He has capitalistic incentives to keep good ties with senior executives of North Korean government agencies and enterprises. Here's an interesting tweet regarding the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act:
https://twitter.com/felixabt/status/1471787670003228680
On the whole, he seems to think the Chinese government is better than the US, to which I'll say you're entitled to your own opinions.
In the "serious inconsistencies" article he focuses on one statement:
> “Every morning at riversides like this you can see dead bodies floating. If you go out in the morning, they are there.”
His rebuttal came with a:
> a photo on his Twitter account that appears to show children happily at play in a North Korean river.
But that original statement in the article comes with an asterisk stating that the reporting was erroneous:
> *Update: It appears the newspaper misquoted Park. What she actually said was: “Every morning and every … like … some riverside like this [gesturing out the window] you can see the dead bodies floating, and if you go out in the morning and just people dead there.” It should also be noted that the BBC did in fact film a body in the Tumen river on the Chinese side of the border in 2008.
I don't doubt there were exaggerations of the story from Park. But the source of the accusation has a rather extreme personality himself.
Lastly, you should at least read the article you linked all the way through the section "UPDATE: A Response from Yeonmi Park" until the very end. I would be more surprised to see no exaggerations from a child who left a dictatorship surviving under nutritional deficiencies. Lastly, if you have ever written journalistic articles, you would know reporters oftentimes take aggressive stances to support their own arguments for the sake of publicity. I personally find the claims made in the article to be a bit reaching for straws.
As for myself, I don't think it matters if a few details were embellished, when the message still holds as a warning about authoritarian governments, generational forgetfulness, and a climate of increasing censorship.
To me, what was important about the podcast was the realization that the things described in dystopian novels are not just works of fiction, nor events of the past, but that it is happening somewhere in our world at this very moment, and that there is a very good possibility that the US can fall into such a reality as well given the increasing levels of censorship and misinformation that various parties all seem to be fighting for in order to control the minds of others.
What really scares me is that everyday people like you and me read news like this and go back to our living our normal lives afterwards as if it does not exist, and that reality goes back to being fiction as if it never existed when in fact it is the reality we live in.
I grew up behind the Iron Curtain, in the middle of Siberia, and witnessed the “glory” of a totalitarian communist government first hand. It was a different government, but also to a much more mature age than what Park saw herself. Since move abroad, I’ve seen “testimonials” from people with my background that were not technically wrong, but certainly were purified to fall into a specific spectrum of truth that is rewarded by the Western media. What strikes me the most is the way Park responded to the article - essentially she didn’t deny/engage any objections, and said she needs to review her (primary) sources. This position is as strong of an admission of “I don’t actually know what I’m talking about; these are folk stories I heard from someone else” as I’ve seen from my fellow countrymen and women. It’s not wrong, it’s “not even wrong”.
* Park’s account of the mother’s crime changes constantly, depending it seems on her audience
* Park says her father was sentenced to 17 or 18 years in prison. Her mother told us he was initially sentenced to a year, but later it was increased to ten years.
* Park’s mother told us prosecutors interrogated her on and off for about a year – sometimes at home in Hyesan and sometimes elsewhere [...] But, in a recent BBC radio interview, Park claimed her mother was imprisoned for six months
* When she spoke with us, Park told of how her and her sister, at just nine and eleven, were left to fend for themselves after their parents were jailed. “We have shower and wash our clothes there and then we go to the mountain to get the grass to eat,” she said. But, in the BBC radio interview, Park claimed her sister went to live at her uncle’s house
* .... the host of the show says to Park’s mother, “When we talk about stories of people eating grass or people struggling to eat, Yeju (Park’s pseudonym) says, ‘Oh that never happened…’
* The story of her escape has multiple versions with incompatible fundamentals (like who escaped, when, and how), and increasing in brutality over time.
- Ilya Sutskever (https://shows.acast.com/the-robot-brains/episodes/ilya-sutsk...)
- Andrej Karpathy (https://shows.acast.com/the-robot-brains/episodes/andrej-kar...)
Two awesome Aussies talk about all kinds of insane stuff. Coast to Coast Art Bell style.
Some popsci youtubers started the safety third podcast, which is entertaining. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7QE72cxiBkiwnvGoFfqYOg
John Carreyrou the journalist first to break the scandal of the blood-testing company Theranos, podcast covering the trial of CEO Elizabeth Holmes.
https://www.threeuncannyfour.com/show/bad-blood/
Hanselminutes
Scott Hanselman's podcast has many interesting guests covering a myriad of subjects.
Spinning the call for donations into a segment of content this way is pretty brilliant.
it does not make you smarter or more aware of what’s happening, but you can have an occasional laugh.
So as to not post again in the thread, Le Show by Harry Schearer is a political satire radio show from a man who used to voice a ton of characters for The Simpsons. Hes been doing his show for over 30 years and its still very entertaining. I have listened to it for the majority of my life, when it used to broadcast on the radio (it still does). Give it a listen!
Very enjoyable to hear stories from founders of a selection of interesting companies and very well presented by Guy Raz.
Yes, it's a bit trite, but actually thinking about the media I consume is very enlightening.
Always Sunny in Philadelphia podcast (if you love the show)
Where should we begin